I am always being told off by i-technologists for quoting Picasso as having said that computers are useless. But I still love his reasoning? "Because they can only give you answers."

Picasso, like AJAXWorld Magazine, liked questions. So we thought we would share with you what some of the world's leading rich Internet application pioneers are thinking may be the next questions that we need to see answered. From that readers can themselves infer where AJAX is headed.

What are the top questions to ask next about AJAX?

Eric Miraglia of Yahoo!

1. (From March'08) How do I calculate the ROI of building my RIA on the iPhone SDK vs using AJAX?

2. How do I assess the performance of my app and decide what to do next to make it faster?

3. When it comes to accessibility, how do I know what's required of me for my rich web apps? Beyond what's required, what makes good business sense?

4. What are the ten most important steps I can take to make sure my rich internet app is secure? What tools are available to help me diagnose whether it's secure?

5. For all the press that they get, are mashups really contributing to the experience of the web?

Douglas Crockford, creator of JSON

I just have one question I'd like answered: How are we to fix the web? AJAX exploits all of the remaining capability of the 1999 browser standards, which were not state of the art even then. Where do we go from here? Will open standards fall to technologically superior proprietary systems?

Coach Wei, founder and CTO of Nexaweb

1. What are people mostly using AJAX for? Enhancing existing website, building a new website, building an application, replacing an old client/server application, etc?

2. How much JavaScript did your team write for your AJAX-enabled website/web app (excluding third party Javascript libraries): under a hundred lines of Javascript, a few hundred lines , a few thousand lines, tens of thousands of lines or even more?

3. Are you using mashup or do you plan to do some mashup, for which kind of project?

4. Which tools (IDE) do people using for AJAX development?

5. Do you still develop web 1.0 style applications, and why?

See next page for predictions from: Google's Christian Schalk, JackBe's John Crupi, Josh Gertzen of the ThinWire AJAX Framework, Kevin Hakman of TIBCO GI, and Andre Charland of Nitobi.

Next March's Conference is has been receiving higher-caliber suggestions and submissions than ever.

Is it easy yet to make AJAX applications that easily go offline? Are developers better off using an AJAX framework, a toolkit or just coding their own AJAX/JavaScript? Will JavaScript 2.0 be a success, or a dud? How can AJAX apps be made secure? When will AJAX development finally be easy? Submissions on these and dozens of other topics have already begun streaming in to AJAXWorld Conference & Expo 2008 East, being held in New York City on March 18-20, 2008.

Jeremy Geelan is Chairman & CEO of the 21st Century Internet Group, Inc. and an Executive Academy Member of the International Academy of Digital Arts & Sciences. Formerly he was President & COO at Cloud Expo, Inc. and Conference Chair of the worldwide Cloud Expo series. He appears regularly at conferences and trade shows, speaking to technology audiences across six continents. You can follow him on twitter: @jg21.

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Most Recent Comments

RIA News Desk01/23/08 07:04:23 AM EST

we would share with you what some of the world's leading rich Internet application pioneers are thinking

There's a growing impedance mismatch between the large scale providers of content and the consumers of that content as we build multiple messaging architectures. How realistically do we resolve this mismatch in such a way that we are able to preserve both flexibility (SOAP), simplicity (Atom) and brevity (JSON), and can we do so without sparking a religious war?

Crolly Darvo12/18/07 05:06:41 AM EST

Will the browsers development, unification and standardization give us more possibilities and freedom to sophisticate or simplify our interfaces & APIs?

Brett Green12/13/07 01:24:02 PM EST

Do you believe a shift back towards rich desktop apps, which are internet-enabled, will lead away from the need for AJAX-enabled web applications?

If you imagine the a URI is a handle to a given resource -- is the AJAX community pushing to retain the isomorphic relationship between the URI and a given state of a web application as it changes through AJAX interaction?

Are off-line applications for web the right direction? Is Google Gears relevant when more and more devices has 24/7 Internet access?
Will web applications of the future be complex on client and lightweight on server side or rather the opposite? This is essential issue to me, as Tigermouse framework I develop favors the later approach.

Other questions like: [1] ambiguity in AJAX toolkits, can I match them? how an aspect in Toolkit A can influence toolkit B? The namespaced Web apps becomes now important. It's the same that happened in Browser space, they were different, then become a bit shared, the AJAX toolkits work also may reach a convergence state as we have offline/online caching infra-structure with namespaced events - sandboxed apps in the same page but running each in a given scope.

I think the next stage promises good things for us and the current stage is a mess with good value under it. The exploration of the mashup stack and mashup infra for interoperability is an area to massage.

WishList12/09/07 02:22:28 AM EST

If only AJAX could somehow bring us a spam-free internet, now THAT would be a rich future!

While Ajax represents the future, it looks like in Georgia they still have developers working in ColdFusion from Adobe - how come? Here's the link: http://www.dot.state.ga.us/

IMHO11/09/07 08:59:40 AM EST

Development managers need to ask themselves at least these two questions before adopting AJAX on a project. First, will you make up for the time invested in adopting a new technology through increased development speed? And second, will AJAX allow you to offer a more useful application to your users?

Ahmed ALEM11/07/07 06:32:56 AM EST

The answer is definitely: Java + XML + XSLT + a new ML, instead of: JavaScript + XML + HTML. But is there any project which take into account all these ideas? Are there any band of developers who are interested in re-inventing a better wheel?

It was inevitable that someone would use web 2.0 social aspects together with an AJAX interaction layer to create a next generation weblog. As usual it took a seventeen year old to do it. Logahead is everything I've been looking for recently in blogging software. It's PHP, MySQL, AJAX, and has several social features.

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